[Blindmath] Is the PDF format acceptable as an assistive technology

[Michael Whapples]

There is a lot you have said there.

Firstly the main question, is PDF an acceptably accessible format? The 
answer is, potentially in theory it could be better than it normally is and 
possibly may be about as good as most other main stream alternatives. On the 
equations thing, I believe Niel Soyfer from design science may be involved 
in a project to make equations accessible in PDF, but like most things in 
this field progress is slow and I don't think anything is confirmed to be 
included anytime soon. Having said that, in practice it normally falls far 
below that and is very substandard as the author has to do specific things 
to make it accessible (many might not) and some tools may simply not support 
the accessibility stuff anyway (eg. many of the non-adobe PDF creation 
tools).

Also we probably shouldn't forget that while PDF is bad, other formats can 
be bad and sometimes its just down to the way the document has been created. 
For example even with that physics book you have been mentioning, the images 
you said had no figure captions, well in XHTML if there are no figure 
captions and it just relies on the reader judging from the positioning which 
diagram is being discussed this could make it hard for a blind student to 
cross reference to accessible copies of the diagrams.

Also while vector images in PDF seem to be causing you the problems for 
extracting images, vector images have sometimes been useful to me as the 
text of vector images are accessible and so I can do things like check the 
labels on diagrams I produce, sometimes where the image is mainly text I can 
actually make quite a bit of use of it (eg. affinity diagrams), etc.

OK, to whether something needs doing, yes it does and what to do? I agree 
with you on the analysis that we are such a small group that even 
collectively we probably will be unable to make any change. The key thing we 
really lack is power. What you suggest about getting a organisation 
championing the cause with suitable technical backing is one option. However 
like anything there is more than one way to skin a cat. The main demand for 
text books come from educational establishments, I don't know the situation 
in the US, but I believe here in the UK the university or college have a 
responsibility to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students, not the 
publishers. This means if the publisher has no accessible version of the 
book then if its reasonable to expect the university or college to produce 
an accessible version they should. If the support services for disabled 
students find making these books accessible then may be they should push for 
their establishment to insist that only accessible (or the most accessible) 
text books can be used/chosen by tutors. If colleges and universities 
started insisting on this, then those publishers refusing to provide 
accessible books would start loosing out on sales (it would make commercial 
sense for them to start making the book accessible). Whether colleges and 
universities would be prepared to take such a move I don't know, I almost 
doubt they would.

There certainly is an important question in what you wrote, why don't 
publishers do it now? Well one could ask why is support for blind students 
studying maths or science so poor in universities and colleges? There have 
been cases on this list where people have asked about writing maths and some 
responses have said that in the US the college has a legal responsibility to 
enable the student to work in the format of their preference, so why do 
colleges not just comply? Is it a case of "let's see what we can get away 
with", is it a case of ignorance/lack of awareness, is it a case of a lack 
of ability/skills (even if considering to buy in the skills), or is it 
something else? I guess I am thinking, unless we can find out why, we cannot 
solve the problem.

Michael Whapples

-----Original Message----- 
From: Richard Baldwin
Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2012 5:06 PM
To: BlindMath Mailing List ; accessibleimage at freelists.org
Subject: [Blindmath] Is the PDF format acceptable as an assistive technology

In an earlier post on a different thread, I wrote:

"... I have unfortunately concluded that a sighted assistant will almost
always be required for the successful extraction of pictures from pdf files
for use by blind students.

It looks to me like it is time for some advocacy group for blind students
to declare that pdf is an inaccessible format and is not acceptable as an
assistive technology for providing educational material to blind students.

One alternative that is well known, relatively easy to produce, and far
less prone to accessibility problems is XHTML. -- But XHTML probably has
some warts in the accessibility area as well."

Amanda replied:

"As you know, even if that physics book had no pictures, it would still be
inaccessible. If a blind person needed to take basic math and all they had
to study was the pdf, they would probably fail. I think that not only
should the files be readable, but they should also contain labels pointing
to separate picture files for embossing. ....

I really want to be involved in fixing this situation but don't know where
to begin or who to contact. I'm sure part of the problem is lack of
awareness on the part of publishers, but that can't be all that's going on
here. Do you have any thoughts on how I might get started?"

--End of quotations--

Here are some of my thoughts. First, I am able to answer many of your
questions regarding math, physics, computer programming, and engineering,
but when you ask questions about how to bring about social change, you are
probably asking the wrong person. That is far out of my area of expertise.

However, even though I don't have any answers, I do have some thoughts.

First again, achieving change of this magnitude will probably require group
action spearheaded by some recognized organization such as the NFB for
example. There is probably little or nothing that an individual can do
alone.

Second, that organization will need to have backup from some really capable
technical blind people, such as Michael Whapples, Sina Bahram, and John
Gardner.

Third, I would suggest that pictures, images, illustrations, charts,
diagram, or whatever you choose to call them be considered a very high
priority. Here is my reasoning for that suggestion.

For you and your physics book, the most important accessibility problem is
the equations, which understandably are more important to you than the
pictures. However, you belong to a minority group within a minority group.
I may be wrong, but my guess would be that the majority of blind college
students are mainly enrolled in degree plans such as English, history,
sociology, political science, etc. And (just like the majority of sighted
students) most of those students never see an equation and wouldn't know
what it is if they saw one one.

However, even those students are confronted with textbooks that contain
pictorial illustrations of material that is germane to their field of
study. Some even have textbooks that contain pie charts, bar charts, and an
occasional line graph, which are difficult to explain with words.

My point is that for the majority of blind students, the thing that is most
important to you (equations) is not important to them at all. However, you
do have common ground with the majority of blind students when it comes to
pictorial illustrations in textbooks. All textbooks have them and all blind
students should be at least moderately interested in them. After all, there
is a lot of truth to the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand
words.

Regarding equations, I believe that the organization that takes the lead in
such an effort should flatly state that, while the technology for dealing
with images is far from being settled, there are recognized standards for
dealing with math in a way that blind students can understand. They should
further take the position that it is simply unacceptable for textbook
publishers to fail to follow those standards when providing supposedly
accessible textbook formats to blind students.

As a minimum, all textbook publishers should be prepared to provide
separate files containing all images in a recognized, non-proprietary image
format and should be prepared to provide separate files containing all math
and all equations in a recognized standard format. Obviously, they should
also be prepared to provide information that correlates the material in
those files to the page and paragraph of the textbook.

Going beyond the minimum, all of the content of an electronic document that
is provided to blind students for purposes of accessibility should be
easily extractable intact into a well-documented non-proprietary electronic
digital format (other than voice) so that it can be subjected to current
and future developments in assistive technology.

Here is an analogy for what I mean by current and future developments in
assistive technology. During the days of film cameras, you snapped a
picture and unless you operated your own expensive and messy film
development laboratory, what you got back from the developer was what you
got back. You kept the good photographs and you discarded the bad ones.

However, with the advent of digital photography, tremendous strides have
been made in the ability to enhance photographs. Using a program like
Photoshop, even a novice who doesn't understand the mathematics involved
can often rescue a bad photograph and turn it into a good one. That can be
very important if the photograph happens to be the only photograph that you
own of your now-deceased grandmother and it was taken during her 101st
birthday party.

I predict that there will also be similar advances in assistive technology
to make it easier for blind students to understand the various kinds of
information in a textbook. I don't know what those advances will be, but I
do know that if the information in a textbook is locked inside a
proprietary, non-accessible format (like pdf), it won't matter, because it
won't be possible to apply the advanced technology to the information.

And by the way, I doubt that this problem is the result of "a lack of
awareness" on the part of textbook publishers.

Those are some of my thoughts.

Dick Baldwin

-- 
Richard G. Baldwin (Dick Baldwin)
Home of Baldwin's on-line Java Tutorials
http://www.DickBaldwin.com

Professor of Computer Information Technology
Austin Community College
(512) 223-4758
mailto:Baldwin at DickBaldwin.com
http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/
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